CONTENTS
1. Stanford “stooping to new lows”
2. British Muslims force Holocaust Memorial Day cancellation
3. Spanish town attempts to hold “Palestinian Genocide Day”
4. Thank you, BBC
5. David Irving: Auschwitz was “a tourist attraction”
6. Holocaust memorial in Berlin used as a public lavatory by tourists
7. 5,000 Euro Holocaust fine for French politician
8. Anti-Semitic attacks up in Argentina
9. Russia sentences anti-Semitic editor
10. “Holocaust denial comes to Stanford” (Stanford Daily, Jan. 25, 2007)
11. “Bolton bans Holocaust Day” (Jewish Telegraph, Jan. 26, 2007)
12. “Marked rise in attacks on Jews in Europe over the past year” (Ha’aretz, Jan. 29, 2007)
13. “Murdered Frenchman Halimi to be buried in Jerusalem next month” (EJP, Jan. 21, 2007)
14. “Irving denies gas chambers existed at Auschwitz” (AP, Jan. 25, 2007)
15. “Holocaust memorials defiled by neo-Nazis” (Times of London, Jan. 30, 2007)
This dispatch deals with contemporary anti-Semitism. This phenomena forms an important backdrop to attitudes on Israel in the Muslim and wider world, which is why I occasionally include articles on this subject.
STANFORD “STOOPING TO NEW LOWS”
In the first piece below, Stanford law school fellow Amichai Magen writes of “a relentless campaign to demonize the Jewish People and delegitimize Israel” on the campus of Stanford, one of the world’s leading universities.
“The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East (CJME) and its splinter group, ‘Students Confronting Apartheid in Israel (SCAI)’… are stooping to new lows and aligning themselves with the most radical elements in the Middle East by hosting Norman Finkelstein on this campus.”
Finkelstein, who is of Jewish origin, voices opinions which are regarded by many as anti-Semitic. He does not, says Magen, claim (like David Irving) that the Holocaust did not happen but that “the Jews, in a fiendish conspiracy, have fabricated a ‘Holocaust Industry’ in order to portray themselves as victims, cynically exploit their suffering and consolidate Israel as a power set on regional domination. If the Holocaust had never happened, the Jews would have invented it themselves, since the Holocaust served their diabolical quest for money and global imperialism.”
Finkelstein also has a track record of exaggerating the numbers of Roma and homosexuals killed by the Nazis in order to downplay Jewish suffering.
* For more on Finkelstein, see the last note in the dispatch, Jews against Israel: King, Kaufman, & Judt, Europe’s so-called “good Jews” (Dec. 1, 2005).
* For Roma and the Holocaust, see this article by myself in The Wall Street Journal.
BRITISH MUSLIMS FORCE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY CANCELLATION
The council for the northern British town of Bolton scrapped its Holocaust Memorial Day event last Saturday.
It is to replaced with a Genocide Memorial Day in June. This is in line with the policy of the Muslim Council of Britain who continue to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day in favor of a Genocide Day which also includes “the ongoing genocide and human rights abuses of Palestinians” by Israelis. There is, of course, no genocide of the Palestinians, and those that suggest there is, usually do so out of anti-Semitic motives.
The Bolton council decision was made in consultation with the town’s Interfaith Council. But Rabbi Joseph Lever of United Synagogue who has participated in the Bolton event for the last three years was not consulted on the decision.
In September 2005, British prime minister Tony Blair was urged to ditch Holocaust Day in favor of Genocide Day. For more see Blair urged to ditch Holocaust Day; UK government advisor says Holocaust “a myth” (Sept. 12, 2005).
SPANISH TOWN ATTEMPTS TO HOLD “PALESTINIAN GENOCIDE DAY”
Also last weekend, the Spanish town of Ciempozuelos near Madrid decided to cancel the UN-established International Holocaust Remembrance Day in lieu of “The Day Commemorating the Genocide of the Palestinian People”. Last minute action by the Israeli Embassy in Madrid and by Spanish officials resulted in the town canceling both. The Anti-Defamation League slammed the decision to cancel the Holocaust memorial day as “shameful.”
The affair was covered extensively by the Spanish press. El Mundo, the country’s largest daily newspaper, ran an editorial on the Ciempozeulos affair under the title – “An insult to Israel”.
THANK YOU, BBC
The “Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism” has said that “2006 was characterized by escalation in the number and violent nature of attacks on Jews, proliferation of Holocaust denial and increased comparison of Israel to the Nazi regime.”
Last year saw a substantial rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in particular in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia. Jewish Agency official Amos Hermon linked the rise in anti-Semitic incidents to “the recent Lebanon war and the Qana incident [which] led to the most severe incidents in the past decade.” (Qana was badly misreported, in a way which, unsurprisingly, stirred up hatred of Jews in general. See my article “The Media Works for Hizbullah”.)
One of the worst anti-Semitic incidents in the past year was the murder of Ilan Halimi. The penultimate article below reports that his body will be buried in Jerusalem on February 9. For more on Ilan Halimi, see my article “The barbarians of Europe”.
DAVID IRVING: AUSCHWITZ WAS “A TOURIST ATTRACTION”
David Irving, a British “historian,” who was jailed by Austria for three years in February 2006 for repeatedly questioning the Holocaust, but was released last month on appeal, has again claimed that the Auschwitz death camp was a tourist attraction, and added that there was no proof that there were ever gas chambers there.
Irving made his repulsive comments during an interview with Italy’s Sky TG24 News. He said “At Auschwitz they did not have gas chambers, or at least there is no proof that I am satisfied with.”
For more on Irving, see: David Irving says from prison: “The Jews will see a second Holocaust in 20 to 30 years” (Feb. 27, 2006).
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL IN BERLIN USED AS A PUBLIC LAVATORY BY TOURISTS
The final article below, a report in yesterday’s Times of London, reveals that the main Holocaust memorial in Berlin is being used as a public lavatory by tourists and by neo-Nazi sympathizers. The defacing of Jewish memorial areas in Germany by followers of the far Right has become a widespread problem, says The Times. On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day last weekend, a group of youths set fire to a restored Holocaust era railway carriage in Lower Saxony. Among other similar incidents, in Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border, three youths urinated on a Jewish memorial.
5,000 EURO HOLOCAUST FINE FOR FRENCH POLITICIAN
Bruno Gollnisch, the No. 2 in the far-right National Front party in France, last week received a three-month suspended jail sentence and was fined 5,000 Euros ($6,500) for questioning the Holocaust.
ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACKS UP IN ARGENTINA
Anti-Semitic attacks increased sharply during the past year in Argentina, according to a new study released by the DAIA Jewish political umbrella group. They said there were 540 reported cases of serious anti-Semitic attacks in 2006. That’s 32 percent higher than in 2005, when 376 attacks were reported.
RUSSIA SENTENCES ANTI-SEMITIC EDITOR
The editor of a fringe anti-Semitic newspaper in northwestern Russia was sentenced last week to more than two years in prison for inciting ethnic hatred. Russian news agencies reported that a court in Novgorod ruled that Pavel Ivanov, editor of Russkoe Veche, was also guilty of inciting extremist activity through his newspaper. It was unclear whether Ivanov, 57, who has beaten similar charges several times in the past, will appeal the sentence.
I attach six articles below.
-- Tom Gross
FULL ARTICLES
“SHOULD THIS ACADEMIC FRAUDSTER BE ENTERTAINED AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY?”
Holocaust denial comes to Stanford
By Amichai Magen
The Stanford Daily
January 25, 2007
The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East (CJME) and its splinter group, Students Confronting Apartheid in Israel (SCAI), are at it again; pulling no punches in their relentless campaign to demonize the Jewish People and delegitimize Israel. Tonight, the two student groups are stooping to new lows and aligning themselves with the most radical elements in the Middle East by hosting Norman Finkelstein on this campus.
Finkelstein is an academic joke, and a bad one at that. The 54-year-old Assistant Professor at DePaul University, Illinois, has been hired and let go by several middling schools, before gaining his current (untenured) position in 2003. The New York Times Book Review has described his work as “juvenile,” “arrogant” and “stupid.”
He is an American-born son of two Holocaust survivors who began his career as an anti-Israel political agitator – circumstances which on their own make his claims to objective historical scholarship on the Holocaust highly suspect. Finkelstein can neither read nor write German. Being unable to access many of the sources that are the foundation of sound research in this highly complex and sensitive field has not prevented Finkelstein from passing sweeping, tendentious and twisted judgments on one of the saddest, and most important, episodes in human history.
In essence, Finkelstein’s argument is as follows: The Jews, in a fiendish conspiracy, have fabricated a “Holocaust Industry” in order to portray themselves as victims, cynically exploit their suffering and consolidate Israel as a power set on regional domination. If the Holocaust had never happened, the Jews would have invented it themselves, since the Holocaust served their diabolical quest for money and global imperialism.
This thesis is a hodge-podge of pathological paranoia, ignorance, malice and brutal disrespect to the memory of the millions of human beings systematically murdered by the Nazis (Christians, Jews and Muslims). If we applied Finkelstein’s warped logic, we would conclude that Blacks “exploit” the history of slavery to obtain civil rights gains or that in the 20th-century, women have created a “Feminism Industry” in a cruel attempt to gain power and subjugate men. How many Einsteins, how many Kafkas, how many Menuhins, how many lives (born and yet to be born) were lost forever in the furnaces of Auschwitz? The world will never know. But to suggest that the Jewish People, or anyone else on this planet, has “profited” from the extinguishing of so many souls – each of infinite value in its own right – is monstrous beyond belief.
Finkelstein’s brand of Holocaust denial is all the more pernicious for its relative subtlety. Unlike David Irving – who claims the gas chambers never existed and that Hitler was the Jews’ greatest friend – Finkelstein (who calls Irving “a good historian”) admits that it did happen, and then proceeds to turn the Holocaust into a tool with which to attack its primary victim. In the Finkelstenian mind, the Jews, and the Jews alone, are prohibited from collective mourning. Jewish insistence that the Holocaust be remembered becomes an act of unforgivable Jewish aggression, for which Israel must be “censured,” to use one of his favorite expressions of attack. This Holocaust erosion is at once more subversive and more dangerous than the outright factual denial practiced by the likes of Irving or Iran’s President, Ahmedinejad. It insidiously assaults our moral imperative to remember the Holocaust and eats away at its chief lesson to humanity: Never again!
Not surprisingly, Finkelstein has become the house favorite of neo-fascists in America, Europe and the Middle East; the dream-Jew of the post-Holocaust anti-Semites. David Duke – the white supremacist and former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klax Klan – endorses him warmly on his Web site (www.davidduke.com). German neo-Nazi queen, Ingrid Rimland, has intimated that Finkelstein’s writing makes her feel “like a kid in a candy store.” And Finkelstein’s own enthusiasm for Osama bin Laden and Hezbollah have made him a welcome guest on the radical Shiite militia’s official satellite TV station, Al-Manar.
Finkelstein is an American citizen and thus at liberty to express his odious views. But free speech is not at issue here. The real question is should this academic fraudster be entertained at Stanford University? Does Finkelstein’s message of hate enhance or diminish our academic standards and community? And is it legitimate for CJME, a Stanford funded student organization, to offer its uncritical, enthusiastic endorsement to a man who defames an entire people and its six million murdered innocents purely for the purpose of making Israel look bad?
BRIT MUSLIMS PREVENT HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY
Bolton bans Holocaust Day
The Jewish Telegraph
January 26, 2007
www.jewishtelegraph.co.uk/man_1.html
In a move widely seen to be bowing to Muslim pressure, Bolton Council has scrapped its Holocaust Memorial Day event.
The council is to replace it with a Genocide Memorial Day in June. This is in line with the policy of the Muslim Council of Britain, which continues to boycott HMD and is asking for a Genocide Day, which will also mark “the ongoing genocide and human rights abuses of Palestinians” by Israelis.
The council decision was made in consultation with the town’s Interfaith Council.
But Rabbi Joseph Lever of United Synagogue who has participated in the Bolton event for around three years was not consulted on the decision. He said: “I mourn the fact that the Holocaust Memorial Day event will not take place in Bolton this year.”
Louis Rapaport, president of the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester, was equally disappointed that the Jewish community was not consulted.
He said: “Bolton, alone of all the local authorities in our area, is not having an HMD event which is a government recommendation.” He added: “There may not be many Jews in Bolton but the day is supposed to have an educational message to the whole community.
“I can’t help feeling the decision was influenced by Bolton’s large Muslim community.”
Holocaust educator David Arnold said: “It is more than unfortunate that Bolton has seen fit to trivialise the remembrance of the Shoah.”
Mr Arnold regretted the intrusion of “politics” into the issue. He said: “It is entirely inappropriate and stems from a failure to understand the issues.”
SUBSTANTIAL RISE IN ANTI-SEMITIC INCIDENTS IN EUROPE IN 2006
Marked rise in attacks on Jews in Europe over the past year
By Amiram Barkat
Ha’aretz
January 29, 2007
Last year saw a substantial rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Germany, Austria and the Scandinavian countries, according to the Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism.
In an annual press conference, the forum explained that 2006 was characterized by escalation in the number and violent nature of attacks on Jews, proliferation of Holocaust denial and increased comparison of Israel to the Nazi regime.
The Global Forum – a joint effort of the Jewish Agency, the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office – counted 360 anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2006, compared to 300 in 2005. In the United Kingdom, the report listed a yearly decrease from 321 incidents in 2005 to 312 incidents in 2006. Russia recorded 300 incidents in 2006 compared to 250 the preceding year, and Austria saw a jump from 50 incidents to 83 last year. The Scandinavian countries saw 53 incidents in 2006, substantially more than the previous year’s 35. The report cited a 60-percent rise in incidents in the Berlin area, although it did not include figures for all of Germany.
Spokesmen for the forum emphasized on Sunday the many difficulties in classifying and reporting anti-Semitic incidents that affect the accuracy of the figures, which are primarily valuable as indicators of trends in the countries examined.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Sunday that national leaders abroad must understand that anti-Semitism is first and foremost their own problem.
Jewish Agency chair Zeev Bielski commented that, “Anti-Semitic phenomena in Europe are very grave and countries like France and England are struggling to handle them.”
January 2006 brought the shocking murder of French Jew Ilan Halimi. Bielski said Halimi’s mother has recently decided to bring her son’s remains to Israel for interment on the first anniversary of his death, next Friday in Jerusalem.
“There is no doubt the recent Lebanon war and the Qana incident led to the most severe incidents in the past decade,” said Jewish Agency official Amos Hermon.
The gravest incident related to the war was the shooting at the Jewish Federation Building in Seattle, Washington last July, when staffer Pamela Waechter was killed and three other people were critically wounded.
The war engendered a wave of criticism in which Israel’s deeds were compared to those of Nazi Germany. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez claimed last August that Israeli aggression in Lebanon was “reminiscent of Hitler’s fascist manner.”
Montreal Mayor Stefane Gendron said in August that “Israelis are modern-day Nazis.”
An editorial cartoon in a Norwegian newspaper showed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as the sadistic SS officer depicted in the movie “Schindler’s List.” Hermon noted that Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder included elements of historical Christian anti-Semitism in his book “God’s Chosen People,” including statements such as, “Don’t worry, Israel will go to exile again,” and, “We laugh at the idea that God chose one people ... gave them stupid stone tablets and a license to kill.”
Other serious incidents in 2006 included the stabbing of synagogue-goers at the Chabad Center in Moscow in January. In a September shooting attack on an Oslo synagogue, no one was injured. The attackers were Islamic extremists who were aided by the extreme right; they had also planned to kidnap the Israeli ambassador, Miriam Shomrat.
Various reports were published in European nations during the year revealing the scope and severity of anti-Semitism. A British parliamentary commission determined that Islamists and the radical left were responsible for increased anti-Semitism in the country. Research published in Germany indicated widespread use of anti-Semitic expressions in schools, primarily by Muslim students. Research in the Ukraine found that about a third of the country’s citizens had negative opinions of Jews.
ILAN HALIMI TO BE BURIED IN JERUSALEM
Murdered Frenchman Halimi to be buried in Jerusalem next month
By Sandra Calme
European Jewish Press
January 21, 2007
Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old Jewish man whose atrocious murder a year ago shocked France, will be buried in Jerusalem on 9 February.
In what police are now admitting was an anti-Semitic attack, Halimi was kidnapped in January last year and then tortured for three weeks before being left to die.
His body will leave France for Israel on an El Al plane on 8 February.
Meanwhile, the French Jewish community will offer a Sefer Torah (Torah scroll) in memory of Halimi during a ceremony Sunday 28 January in the Rue St-Lazare Paris synagogue in the presence of politicians, leaders of the community and his family.
The Sefer Torah will be sent to the Western Wall in Jerusalem two days after his burial.
In another memorial, a forest will be planted in his name in Israel.
Halimi, a cellular phone salesman, went missing on 21 January 2006 after apparently having been lured into a sex-trap by a young woman who came to the shop where he worked in centre of Paris.
He was held and tortured for three weeks in an apartment estate in Bagneux, a poor multi-ethnic suburb, by a gang that sent ransom demands to Ilan’s family.
The kidnappers sent a photo of Ilan via the internet with death threats but failed to arrive at several meetings to collect the ransom from the young man’s relatives.
Halimi died shortly after being found critically wounded, naked and hand-cuffed along a railway track in the suburb of Sainte-Genevieve des Bois, 30 kilometres south of Paris. He was tortured and left with burn marks over four-fifths of his body.
A group who called themselves the “gang of the Barbarous” claimed responsibility for the murder.
The gang’s head, Youssouf Fofana, a 25-year-old French petty criminal of Ivorian origin, was arrested in early March 2006 in the Ivory Coast and extradited to France.
Fofana’s gang apparently used young women as bait to lure their victims, and were suspected of being behind two other extortion rackets that involved threatening doctors, businessmen and minor celebrities.
During police questioning the man who was called the “brain of the barbarians” is reported to have said the gang had targeted Halimi because they presumed Jews were wealthy.
Still today he reportedly expresses no feeling of remorse for Halimi’s heinous kidnapping and murder which was carried out “for money”.
Halimi’s horrific death traumatised the country with its brutality and unsettled the Jewish community, which staged a massive march against racism and anti-Semitism.
After initial reluctance, French authorities have said they believe anti-Semitism was part of the gang’s motives.
In spite of her pain, Ruth Halimi, Ilan’s mother, spoke to the media this week one year after the tragedy.
She called on the French government to take measures to get young people, whatever their religion, be taught essentials values, particularly within the family environment.
IRVING: AT AUSCHWITZ THEY DID NOT HAVE GAS CHAMBERS
Irving denies gas chambers existed at Auschwitz
Holocaust denier says Auschwitz was a tourist attraction, there was no proof it ever had gas chambers
The Associated Press
January 25, 2007
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3356641,00.html
British historian David Irving, who was jailed for questioning the Holocaust in a book published in Austria, said Friday that the Auschwitz death camp was a tourist attraction, and added that there was no proof that it ever had gas chambers.
Irving, whose comments during an interview with Italy’s Sky TG24 News were immediately picked up by Italian news agencies, said there was no doubt the Nazis killed millions of Jews, but said the killings did not take place at Auschwitz.
“At Auschwitz they did not have gas chambers, or at least there is no proof that I am satisfied with,” Irving told the news channel’s program, “controcorrente.” Irving spoke in English, but his comments were translated by a voiceover.
Irving was sentenced in February 2006 to three years under a 1992 Austrian law that applies to “whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse” the Nazi genocide or other Nazi crimes against humanity in a print publication, broadcast or other media.
He was released last month after Vienna’s highest court granted his appeal and converted two-thirds of his three-year sentence into probation. He has been indefinitely banned from Austria. The Italian government will propose legislation this week making it a crime to deny the Holocaust.
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL IN BERLIN USED AS A PUBLIC LAVATORY BY TOURISTS
Holocaust memorials defiled by neo-Nazis
By Roger Boyes
The Times (of London)
January 30, 2007
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2573340,00.html#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=World
The German authorities were preparing for criticism from the Jewish community after it was revealed that a Holocaust memorial in Berlin was being used as a public lavatory by tourists and by neo-Nazi sympathisers.
The disclosure, in a Berlin newspaper, will trigger a new debate about how the Holocaust should be remembered in Germany.
One argument against building the monument – that consists of 2,700 concrete slabs resembling Jewish gravestones – was that it would become a target of anti-Semitic vandals. The managers of the memorial, which attracts 3.5 million visitors a year, have tried to play down the scandal.
“This just belongs to the teething problems of any new monument,” Uwe Neumaerker, of the Memorial Foundation, said. The German Government has been aware of the problem since the monument was completed in May 2005 but has tried to maintain a silence for fear of encouraging more vandalism.
The defacing of Jewish memorial areas in Germany by followers of the far Right has become a widespread problem that is acknowledged rarely.
On the eve of Holocaust Day at the weekend a group of youths set fire to a restored railway carriage – symbolising the deportation of the Jews – in Lower Saxony. In the eastern German port of Stralsund, concrete was poured over a memorial for a Jewish family, the Keibel-Cohns.
A court in Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border, sentenced three youths to between nine and 14 months jail this month for urinating on a Jewish memorial.
NOTE ON EILAT BOMBING
Yesterday’s dispatch was not delivered by some servers. It can be read here. It was also linked to by several other sites such as www.honestreporting.co.uk/articles/critiques/BBC_Under_Fire.asp
and adloyada.typepad.com/adloyada/2007/01/will_the_real_p.html and littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24201_And_Again&only.
There was some disgraceful misreporting by certain correspondents for CNN International and BBC World Service yesterday. In covering the Eilat suicide bomb, they insinuated that the 30 Palestinians that have been killed in recent days were killed by Israel (when in fact none of them were) and thereby suggested that the Eilat bomb was some kind of justifiable revenge.
A PAKISTANI VICTIM
The report on CNN about the suicide bombing in Pakistan which came after the one about the suicide bombing in Israel was a straight news report. The suicide bomber in Pakistan, who killed a policeman, was referred to as a terrorist (unlike the bomber of civilians in Israel) and CNN made no kind of phony apologetics for the perpetrators in Pakistan. No qualifications. No additions. Just straight reporting.
A “GREAT HERO”
The murdered Israelis (as not mentioned on CNN or BBC) were aged 26, 27 and 32. The explosives were Soviet-made (of a kind that are widespread in Gaza and were purchased with international aid money donated to the Palestinian Authority). The parents of the bomber told Palestinian media today that their son was a “great hero.” His brother added: “Nothing can be more glorious than for him to become a Shahid (martyr). We are all so happy that Allah gave him this privilege.”
The target of the bomber was a much more crowded location in downtown Eilat rather than the bakery that he blew himself up in as the police closed in on him. For more on the dramatic events leading up to the bomb, please see the final article in this dispatch below: “Driver who picked up terrorist considered running him over” (Ha’aretz, Jan. 30, 2007).
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said he will not order any significant military response to the suicide bombing in Eilat and Israel will maintain its ceasefire despite the rain of Qassam rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel.
-- Tom Gross
CONTENTS
1. Saddam’s victims, and Hitler’s
2. The first Arab to be named as a Righteous Gentile
3. For some Haifa residents, “The war that hasn’t ended”
4. The Julius Hirsch stadium
5. “Iraq learns from Yad Vashem” (Yediot Ahronot, Jan. 24, 2007)
6. “Holocaust honour for Arab who saved Jews from Nazis” (UK Times, Jan. 24, 2007)
7. Haifa Univ. study of impact of Lebanon war on Holocaust survivors (Jan. 21, 2007)
8. “Exhibition reveals secret history of Nazi sex slaves” (Independent, Jan. 24, 2007)
9. “Berlin stadium named for Jewish athlete” (JTA, Jan. 23, 2007)
10. “Yad Vashem to collect names from FSU” (Jerusalem Post, Jan. 27, 2007)
11. “Holocaust remembered in Greek city where Jews once thrived” (AP, Jan. 29, 2007)
12. “Driver who picked up terrorist considered running him over” (Ha’aretz, Jan. 30, 2007)
This dispatch concerns the Holocaust. The next dispatch will deal with contemporary anti-Semitism. Remembrance of the Holocaust and contemporary Holocaust denial (which in the Middle East is often state-sponsored) form an important backdrop to attitudes on Israel in the Muslim and wider world, which is why I occasionally include articles on this subject on this list / website.
SADDAM’S VICTIMS, AND HITLER’S
The first article below, from Israel’s best-selling newspaper Yediot Ahronot, reports that “members of an Iraqi organization planning to perpetuate the memory of thousands of Saddam Hussein’s victims secretly visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem last year.”
The special team has been recording testimonies of survivors who managed to escape Saddam’s atrocities. Thirty members of it also met in the U.S. with Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg, who for many years has been documenting Holocaust survivors’ testimonies.
The head of the Iraqi memorial team, Dr Kenan Makiya, a lecturer at Harvard University who divides his time between Baghdad and Boston, says that while “it is hard to make a comparison between the Iraqi victims and the Holocaust of Jews in Europe, there are some common denominators”. “Saddam treated some of his people in the same way Hitler treated the Jews. In both cases it was a tragedy, and in both cases there were innocent victims.”
THE FIRST ARAB TO BE NAMED AS A RIGHTEOUS GENTILE
This is a follow-up to the dispatch The Holocaust’s Arab heroes (& Polish righteous Gentile recommended for Nobel Prize) (Oct. 11, 2006).
Khaled Abdelwahhab, a wealthy Tunisian landowner, is poised to become the first Arab to be officially named a Righteous Gentile. The award, presented by Yad Vashem, is granted to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Among the most famous persons to receive this honor are Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler.
Abdelwahhab rescued 23 Tunisian Jews as they sheltered in an olive oil factory after being thrown out of their homes by German soldiers. He feared that the women were going to be put to work in a brothel and gave them sanctuary for the remaining six months of the German occupation.
The story of Abdelwahhab was uncovered by Robert Satloff who was writing a book titled “Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands.”
In the Times of London article (attached below), Satloff comments that “These stories are only coming to light now because we haven’t looked too hard before at the Holocaust experience in Arab countries. But another reason is that Arabs who did save Jews didn’t want to be found. They are reluctant to admit that they saved Jews.”
FOR SOME HAIFA RESIDENTS, “THE WAR THAT HASN’T ENDED”
Researchers at the University of Haifa have found “relatively high levels of depression, somatization and loneliness among Holocaust survivors who were residents of Haifa and northern Israel during last summer’s war with Hizbullah.”
The findings were presented by the Center for Research and Study of Aging at the University of Haifa at a recent conference entitled “The War That Hasn’t Ended – Holocaust Survivors in Traumatic Situations in Israel.”
The survey found that common responses to the researchers’ questions were: “I keep taking tranquilizers,” “I don’t have anything to live for,” “If I had the courage, I would kill myself.”
In addition the study “demonstrated the need for organizing and developing a program specifically for elderly Holocaust survivors that will answer their basic functional and emotional needs.”
THE JULIUS HIRSCH STADIUM
A new exhibit at the former Ravensbrück concentration camp’s museum, north of Berlin breaks a taboo on how hundreds of (mainly non-Jewish) women, written off as “antisocial elements” by the Nazis, were arrested, dispatched to camps and forced to work as prostitutes for slave laborers during the Third Reich. The exhibition reveals how the SS delighted in making lesbians work as prostitutes in an attempt to “convert” them. For more, see the fourth article below, from the Independent.
The fifth article below reports that a Berlin stadium has been renamed after a German Jewish soccer star who was murdered in Auschwitz. The Am Eichkamp stadium in West Berlin will now be called the Julius Hirsch stadium. Hirsch was a star player early in the 20th century and a member of the 1912 German Olympic team in Stockholm.
The sixth article reports that “Yad Vashem and the Israeli Immigrant Absorption Ministry have embarked on a project to record the names of Soviet-era Jews who perished in the Holocaust.” Yad Vashem currently has 3.1 million names of Jewish Holocaust victims in its database, of which only 350,000 are of Soviet Jews. It is estimated that only 20 percent of the victims from Soviet areas have been recorded, as opposed to about 80 percent from Western European countries and about 40 percent from nations like Hungary, Poland and Romania.
The seventh article below concerns Sunday’s tribute Sunday to tens of thousands of Greek Jews killed by the Nazis. Greek Jews suffered some of the worst massacres anywhere in the twentieth century. Among the perpetrators was Kurt Waldheim, later appointed as UN Secretary-General and voted Austrian president even after his full role in the Holocaust was exposed. Anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are still widespread in Greece today, even though few Jews remain.
For more on Waldheim, see: UN paying disgraced Waldheim $125,000 per year (Oct. 14, 2002).
-- Tom Gross
“SADDAM TREATED SOME OF HIS PEOPLE IN THE SAME WAY HITLER TREATED THE JEWS”
Iraq learns from Yad Vashem
Members of Iraqi team perpetuating memory of Saddam Hussein’s crimes secretly visit Yad Vashem
By Smadar Perry
Yediot Ahronot
January 24, 2007
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3355792,00.html
Members of an Iraqi organization planning to perpetuate the memory of thousands of Saddam Hussein’s victims secretly visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem last year, Yediot Ahronot can reveal.
The report noted that a special team of Iraqi exiles has for the past year been recording testimonies of survivors who managed to escape Saddam’s atrocities. One of the most prominent testimonies among the hundreds recorded for the planned Iraqi memorial museum, is the one by Avrahan Moshli from Baghdad, an elderly businessman who was apprehended, tortured and who managed to escape and flee to Europe.
It also became known that the 30 members of the Iraqi memorial team met with Jewish film director Steven Spielberg, who is also documenting Holocaust survivors’ testimonies.
During their visit to Israel about a year ago, a member of the Iraqi team met with families of former Iraqis residing in Israel. The head of the Iraqi memorial team, Dr Kenan Makiya who arrived in Israel escorted by two other persons, is lecturer at the Harvard University and he lives in Baghdad and the US.
“It is hard for me to make a comparison between the stories of the Iraqi victims and the Holocaust of Jews in Europe,” Makiya said.
“Yet, there are common denominators,” he added, “Saddam treated some of his people in the same way Hitler treated the Jews. In both cases it was a tragedy, and in both cases there were innocent victims.”
“HE WOULD BE THE FIRST ARAB TO BECOME A RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS”
Holocaust honour for Arab who saved Jews from Nazis
By David Sharrock
The Times (of London)
January 24, 2007
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2562887,00.html
An Arab who saved the lives of two dozen Jews during the Holocaust is about to receive an unprecedented honour from Israel. Khaled Abdelwahhab, a wealthy Tunisian landowner, is poised to become the first Arab to be celebrated as a Righteous Gentile.
The award, presented by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance authority, is granted to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust in which six million died.
More than 21,000 people have been granted the title of Righteous Among the Nations since it was established in 1963, with Oskar Schindler probably the best known. But, in spite of stories of heroism and friendship recorded by members of North Africa’s once-large Jewish community, no candidate has emerged from the Arab Muslim world.
The story of Khaled Abdelwahhab was uncovered by an American Jewish expert on Arab and Islamic politics who was researching for a book.
A survivor told Robert Satloff that Abdelwahhab had rescued 23 Jews, including her family, as they sheltered in an olive oil factory after being thrown out of their homes by German soldiers. He feared that the women were going to be put to work in a brothel and gave them sanctuary for the remaining six months of the German occupation.
Interviewed at her home in Los Angeles a few weeks before her death, Anny Boukris said that Abdelwahhab had discovered that German officers were planning to take her mother, Odette, to work in the brothel they had set up in Mahdia, on the east coast of Tunisia.
Abdelwahhab’s father was a good friend of the Boukris family, so he drove straight to the olive oil factory and told all the Jews sheltering there that their lives were in danger and that they must go with him immediately.
He settled them all at his family farm in the village of Tlelsa, 20 miles from Mahdia, and they remained there until British troops ended the German occupation in April 1943.
Abdelwahhab was 32 when the Germans arrived in Tunisia and was described by Dr Satloff as a bon vivant, blessed with Hollywood film-star looks – and an eye for the ladies. His father was a former minister to the court of the Tunisian bey [sovereign].
Abdelwahhab studied art and architecture in New York and lived for a time in Paris. He married a Venezuelan opera singer in Spain and she became the mother of one of his two daughters. He died in 1997 at the age of 86.
Estee Yaari, of Yad Vashem, told The Times that a file on Abdelwahhab had been opened and would be considered by a commission of experts led by a supreme court judge. “It looks as if there is enough material to move this forward and he would be the first Arab to become a Righteous Among the Nations,” she said.
Dr Satloff, executive director of the Institute for Near East studies in Washington, uncovered the story of Abdelwahhab’s heroism while working on a book that he hoped would break “the conspiracy of silence” in the Arab world surrounding the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.
Dr Satloff, who flew to Israel to meet Yad Vashem officials yesterday, said: “These stories are only coming to light now because we haven’t looked too hard before at the Holocaust experience in Arab countries. But another reason is that Arabs who did save Jews didn’t want to be found. They are reluctant to admit that they saved Jews.”
More than 1.5 million Jews lived in northern Africa during the Second World War and were subject to persecution by the Nazis and their allies there, although few were sent to the death camps in Europe.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS IN TRAUMATIC SITUATIONS IN ISRAEL
University of Haifa study of impact of Lebanon war on Holocaust survivors
Press Release
January 21, 2007
Research at the Center for Research and Study of Aging at the University of Haifa reveals:
A quarter of the Holocaust survivors living in northern Israel that were released from hospitalization shortly before the war were in immediate need of help during the Second Lebanon War, but the some of the local authorities were unaware of their needs.
Researchers found relatively high levels of depression, somatization and loneliness among Holocaust survivors who were residents of Haifa and northern Israel during this summer’s war. The research was conducted by Prof. Ariela Lowenstein, Dr. Dana Parilutzky, Ms. Batya Rappaport and Ms. Dafna Halperin of the Center for Research and Study of Aging at the University of Haifa, conducted on behalf of the Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Survivors in Israel. The research was presented at a conference at the University of Haifa on January 18, 2007, entitled: “The War That Hasn’t Ended – Holocaust Survivors in Traumatic Situations in Israel”.
The study found a quarter of the survivors in immediate need of personal care at home, food or medicine. “The study demonstrated the need for organizing and developing a program specifically for elderly Holocaust survivors that will answer their basic functional and emotional needs,” stated Prof. Lowenstein, head of the Center for Research and Study of Aging.
The Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Survivors in Israel provides services for Holocaust survivors after hospitalization. Following the Second Lebanon War, which was an especially traumatic event for the elderly survivors living in northern Israel, the foundation decided to initiate a survey to evaluate the emotional state of survivors who had recently been released from hospitals and outline their instrumental needs.
The survey identified three main areas of need: home care, medical care and medications and food supplies. Many home care workers left the area fearing the dangers of the Katyusha rockets. Many medical clinics were closed during the war, rendering medical care and medications inaccessible. The lack of mobility of some of these elderly survivors prevented them from acquiring adequate food supplies. About a third of the survivors found themselves living alone, unable to take care of their basic needs. The study found 25% of the survivors in immediate need of assistance and that the some of the local authorities were unaware of these needs. Following the survey, the Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Survivors in Israel promoted coordinated efforts with the municipalities, local associations for the aged and volunteers to provide immediate assistance to those in need.
The survey also found relatively high rates of, depression, somatization and loneliness among survey participants. Common responses to the researchers’ questions were: “I keep taking tranquilizers,” “I don’t have anything to live for,” “If I had the courage, I would kill myself.”
Prof. Lowenstein reported that researchers from the Center for Research and Study of Aging together with the Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Survivors in Israel are currently working on a program that will train professional teams to deal with the special needs of Holocaust survivors in traumatic situations, based on the findings of the survey.
EXHIBITION BREAKS TABOO ON NAZI SEX SLAVES
Exhibition reveals secret history of Nazi sex slaves
By Tony Paterson
The Independent
January 24, 2007
news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2180767.ece
There are no photographs and no names, just scores of faded brown index cards with anonymous prisoner numbers, dates of birth, and the hideously functional term “brothel woman” handwritten in black ink on the bottom right-hand corner of each form.
The files, stacked on desks in a former garage for SS guards at the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp museum in Germany, provide evidence about one of the most sordid but least known aspects of Nazi rule. They recall how hundreds of women, written of as “antisocial elements” by the Hitler regime, were arrested, dispatched to camps and forced to work as prostitutes for slave labourers during the Third Reich.
The plight of the hundreds of women who suffered this fate is the subject of an exhibition which opened last week at the former Ravensbrück camp’s museum, north of Berlin. It breaks a taboo on an issue which has remained a virtual secret since the end of the Second World War.
“Hardly any other part of concentration camp history has been so repressed and so tainted with prejudice and distortion,” said Insa Eschebach, the museum’s director. “The women prisoners who were forced to work as prostitutes remained silent after 1945. Hardly any applied for financial compensation because talking about their experiences was too degrading for them.”
Yet with the help of testimonies by former Ravensbrück prisoners, excerpts from Nazi SS files and accounts by camp guards, the exhibition manages to capture the horror and degradation suffered by the Third Reich’s sex slaves.
Antonia Bruhn, a former inmate at Ravensbrück, where most of the prostitutes were recruited, recalls in a video interview how the women were lured with promises that they would be set free after six months, fed fresh food and vitamins and tanned with sun lamps to improve their looks. Unlike other women prisoners they were allowed to keep their hair. “After they were primped up, they were all tried out by a group of SS guards in the camp operating theatre. Then they were sent off to the concentration camps to work. Of course none of them were set free as the SS had promised.”
The women were forced to work at 10 camps, including Auschwitz, from 1942 until 1945. In special brothels equipped with tiny “copulation cells” the women were obliged to receive eight men a day and up to 40 each at weekends. Sex was only permitted lying down in 20-minute sessions and was controlled by SS guards who watched through spy holes.
Irma Trksak, another inmate, recalled the victims returning from a six-month stint at one camp. “They came back as wrecks. God knows how many men they had had to sleep with. They were ruined, sick and many died afterwards,” she said.
The idea was conceived by Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi SS chief, as an incentive for slave labourers. But it was also designed to combat the spread of homosexuality in all-male labour camps. German prisoners were the chief beneficiaries.
The exhibition reveals how the SS delighted in making lesbians work as prostitutes in an attempt to “convert” them. Homosexuals were also forcibly sent to have sex with prostitutes.
On their return many of the prostitutes were subjected to medical experiments and several died as a result.
BERLIN STADIUM NAMED AFTER JULIUS HIRSCH
Berlin stadium named for Jewish athlete
Jewish Telegraph Agency
January 23, 2007
A Berlin stadium was renamed after a German Jewish soccer star who died in Auschwitz.
In ceremonies on Sunday, the Am Eichkamp stadium in former West Berlin was dedicated to Julius Hirsch.
The decision was prompted by an incident in April 2006 when Jewish Maccabi athletes from four countries took part in the European Maccabi Football Trophy there.
The Berlin Maccabi team had wanted their home stadium to be named for Hirsch, but local sport associations opposed the idea, saying Hirsch had nothing to do with the location and in fact never played in Berlin.
Hirsch, a star player early in the 20th century, was a member of the 1912 German Olympic team in Stockholm.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, his athletic feats were erased from the record books. Hirsch was killed in 1943.
YAD VASHEM TO RECORD NAMES OF SOVIET JEWISH VICTIMS OF NAZIS
Yad Vashem to collect names from FSU
By Amir Mizroch
The Jerusalem Post
January 27, 2007
Yad Vashem and the Immigrant Absorption Ministry have embarked on a project to record the names of Soviet-era Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
Their emissaries will spend a month attempting to visit the roughly one million Russian immigrants in Israel to create a database of names, the ministry said.
Immigrant Absorption Minister Ze’ev Boim said there was a need to “knock on every door” to ask for information about the people who were murdered in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory during World War II.
The “Immortalization Month” campaign aims to gather as many names as possible of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who perished. Yad Vashem has 3.1 million names of Jewish Holocaust victims in its database, of which only 350,000 names belong to Soviet Jews.
The Nazis and their collaborators murdered six million Jews. The low proportion of victims from the Soviet Union whose names have been recorded led Yad Vashem and the ministry to launch the campaign.
According to the ministry, only 20 percent of the victims from Soviet areas have been recorded, as opposed to about 80% from Western European countries and about 40% from nations like Hungary, Poland and Romania.
For example, Yad Vashem has the names of only 7,000 Jews murdered at Babi Yar in the Ukraine, although it is known that some 33,000 Jews were murdered there.
Boris Maftzir, who heads the project for Yad Vashem, lists several reasons for the dearth of recorded names from the former Soviet Union.
During Soviet times it was impossible to commemorate and document the Holocaust, and there was no access to archival material. In addition, the large migration of Soviet Jews in the ’90s hampered efforts to collect information about those who perished, Maftzir says.
Another reason names were not readily accessible, according to Maftzir, was that the Germans had only begun to develop their systematic killing machine when they invaded these areas, and, despite tallying the number of dead, did not document their victims’ names.
To date, Yad Vashem has collected the names of 30,000 victims from Jews living in Russia and the Ukraine. Only several thousand names have been documented as a result of questioning Russian-language immigrants in Israel. Yad Vashem estimates that many of the missing 3,000,000 names are of Jews from Soviet lands.
The project will be conducted during February all over the country, especially in areas with large concentrations of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. They will be presented with a “Witness Document” questionnaire.
Officials from the ministry will focus on its branch offices, immigrant centers, clubs, housing projects, libraries, local authorities, as well as working through immigrant organizations.
The questionnaires, which will collect biographical information about victims from the general public, survivors and the families of victims, will be collated and kept in the hall of names at Yad Vashem.
The Absorption Ministry is also recruiting dozens of volunteers from the immigrant community to conduct interviews with survivors and relatives of victims.
PAYING TRIBUTE TO THE DEAD OF “THE PEARL OF ISRAEL”
Holocaust remembered in Greek city where Jews once thrived
The Associated Press
January 29, 2007
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467836979&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Families of Holocaust survivors paid tribute Sunday to thousands of Greek Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II.
“It is our duty to help future generations by promoting values such as respect for human rights, freedom and solidarity and keeping away from hate and intolerance,” said David Saltiel, the president of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki.
Nearly 90 percent of Greece’s 80,000 Jews were wiped out during the Holocaust. Most of them had lived in this port city once known as the pearl of Israel. Some 1,500 Greek Jews live in Thessaloniki today.
“It created a dent in the city’s demography with whole neighborhoods losing their inhabitants,” said Zanet Battinou, Director of the Jewish Museum in Athens. “These are communities that will not recover from this”.
Many Greek Jews trace their origins back to Sephardic ancestors that took refuge in Thessaloniki after being driven out of Spain in 1492.
The Greek government said International Holocaust Day – formally marked on Saturday – should serve as a strong warning against the danger of racism and against similar atrocities ever taking place again.
“The right to remember and educate generations to come on the Holocaust is evident and nonnegotiable,” Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis said Friday. “It constitutes an underlying condition for avoiding similar genocides in the future.”
A vigil was held on Sunday at the city’s Holocaust monument, followed by speeches by the government officials and the head of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community.
Battinou said Holocaust remembrance remains important, to remind Greeks “there are no solutions so bleak that we cannot do the right thing.”
She added: “We must always find the strength to do what is right (as) values such as democracy and freedom can easily slip from our fingers.”
Greece was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944. The Greek national resistance took on the Jewish cause, organizing safety routes up to the mountains and out to the Middle East.
January 27, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, marks the day in 1945 when the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp – where more than 1.5 million people perished, most of them Jewish – was liberated by Soviet troops.
EILAT DRIVER PLACED IN TERRIBLE DILEMMA
Driver who picked up terrorist considered running him over
By Nir Hasson
Ha’aretz
January 30, 2007
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/819149.html
“I determined where he would get out, I determined that these people would be killed rather than others,” said Yossi Voltinsky, the man who drove the suicide bomber in yesterday’s attack in Eilat and let him off a few minutes before he exploded. Voltinsky was “99 percent sure” his passenger was a suicide bomber. He considered crashing his car or running over the man but did not “because of the 1 percent chance that maybe he was innocent, maybe a crazy, how would I be able to live with that?” Voltinsky said.
Voltinsky, an internal auditor for the Isrotel hotel chain and a lieutenant colonel (Res.), met the terrorist a few minutes after leaving his home in northern Eilat. “I saw a man dressed in red, I didn’t think about him, I often give rides to guys to the hotel area. As soon as I looked at him in the rearview mirror, I saw that something was wrong - he wore a windbreaker zipped to the neck, with a big backpack strapped on. He kept one hand in his pocket, his eyes darted around, he was very nervous. He acted very unnaturally. I asked him where he was headed, he didn’t answer, just motioned for me to keep going. I asked, ‘Where are you from?’ He didn’t answer. I realized at that point I was transporting a hostile person, a terrorist or a robber.”
Voltinsky decided to take a detour to keep the terrorist from reaching a crowded area. “I couldn’t drive to the police station because it’s inside the city, and I didn’t want to go to a checkpoint because I knew that as soon as he saw soldiers, he’d blow up,” Voltinsky said.
A few minutes later, after Voltinsky again asked the man where he wanted to go, he answered, “Haifa.”
“He had a strong Arab accent, I knew he wasn’t Bedouin, I began speeding up to make him suspicious of me. I drove to a remote area and released my seat belt so I could move if I needed to. He sensed everything I did and sat up straight. I thought about using my phone, I was 99 percent sure he was a terrorist.” That was when Voltinsky considered flipping his car over, but then the man motioned for him to stop.
Voltinsky let the man out at the outskirts of the city, about a kilometer from the site of the bombing, and called the police with a description of the man. He tried following him, but lost his trail. A few minutes later the police called Voltinsky to tell him about the explosion and ask him to come and identify the terrorist.
“It was only then that I realized that others were killed. I saw the bodies minutes after the explosion. It is a horrible feeling.”
MURDER IN EILAT
Although this morning’s suicide bomb attack in the Israeli southern resort town of Eilat (which killed at least three people) was the first in Israel for some time, the international media is this morning failing to note that dozens of other would-be bombers have been prevented from entering other parts of Israel in recent months due to Israel’s security fence. The media reports today have also failed to note that rockets continue to be fired almost daily into Israel from the Gaza strip.
Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades are among those groups that have claimed responsibility for this morning’s murders in Eilat. The U.S. government, European Union and the government of Ehud Olmert have all recently given money to Fatah. Israeli Police are currently searching for other bombers believed to be on the loose in the Eilat area.
A Hamas spokesman called this morning’s attack on ordinary Israelis “natural”.
The Palestinian Maan news just announced in Arabic that the suicide bomber is Mohammed Fasial al-Saqsaq, aged 21 from Gaza: www.maannews.net/ar/index.php
And in the last few minutes on the main webpage of Fatah, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, together with al-Quds Brigades and the “Army of Believers” claimed “full responsibility” for the attack and declared that al-Saqsaq is a “hero Shahid (martyr)”: www.kataebaqsa1.com/arabic/index.php. (Please note the photo of Yasser Arafat alongside the announcement.)
-- Tom Gross
CONTENTS
1. GCC would support U.S. strike on Iran
2. Bernard Lewis: No earthly deterrence against Iranian regime
3. U.S. presidential candidates talk tough on Iran
4. Rafsanjani: Iran should give up its nuclear program
5. Israel “drafting a strategy to join NATO”
6. Hizbullah officially opens an Iraqi wing
7. Diplomatic sources: Iranian spies killed former Egyptian ambassador in Iraq
8. IDF destroys two Hizbullah bunkers within Israeli territory
9. Lebanese army hesitates against Hizbullah
10. IDF: Olmert govt. won’t let us stop Hizbullah from rearming
11. Massive international aid for Lebanon
12. U.S. troops authorized to kill Iranian operatives in Iraq
13. Netanyahu asks U.S. pension funds to quit Iran
14. “Russia committed to Iran nuclear plant launch: Ivanov” (AFP, Jan. 28, 2007)
15. “Russian city may be source for uranium” (AP, Jan. 27, 2007)
16. “Russia completes delivery of missiles to Iran” (Deutsche Welle radio, Jan. 23, 2007)
17. “Tor-M1 anti-aircraft missile delivery to Iran completed” (RIA Novosti, Jan. 23, 2007)
18. “N Korea helping Iran with nuclear testing” (Daily Telegraph, Jan. 24, 2007)
19. “Iran, Belarus sign defense agreement” (AFP, Jan. 23, 2007)
This dispatch contains items on recent developments concerning Iran and the Iranian proxy militia Hizbullah.
GCC WOULD SUPPORT U.S. STRIKE ON IRAN
The six Gulf Cooperation Council states would support a U.S. strike to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program, according to a new report by the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. “Teheran has to finally realize that if push comes to shove, if the choice is between an Iranian nuclear bomb and a U.S. military strike, then the Arab Gulf states have no choice but to quietly support the U.S.,” the report said.
The report cited Iran’s military buildup in the Gulf and its refusal to negotiate the seizure of two small islands from the United Arab Emirates.
BERNARD LEWIS: NO EARTHLY DETERRENCE AGAINST IRANIAN REGIME
Prof. Bernard Lewis, of Princeton University, the world’s leading expert on Islam, told the IDC Herzliya security conference last week that Iranian president “Ahmadinejad truly believes in the apocalyptic message he is bringing. This makes him very dangerous. [The Cold War philosophy of] Mutual Assured Destruction, [which prevented the former Soviet Union and the United States from using the nuclear weapons they had targeted at each other,] would not apply to Ahmadinejad’s Iran,” said Lewis. “It is not a deterrent, but an inducement to him.”
U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES TALK TOUGH ON IRAN
Several declared and potential U.S. Presidential hopefuls spoke out strongly against Iran’s nuclear program at the IDC Herzliya security conference (which I attended) last week.
Republicans Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and John McCain, and Democrat John Edwards, all pledged in no uncertain terms that they would not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts and potential contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, said, “Iran must be stopped, Iran can be stopped, and Iran will be stopped.” He also called for economic sanctions on Iran that are “at least as severe” as those imposed on South Africa during its apartheid era. He compared the challenge posed by Iran and militant Islam to the great threats of the 20th century – fascism and totalitarian communism. He also recommended that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be brought before an international court and tried for threatening genocide.
Gingrich said Israel faced the most serious threat to its existence since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. But many in Israel and the United States do not fully appreciate the nature, size and scope of the Iranian threat, he said.
McCain, the presidential front-runner, said he supported exploring a strengthening of ties between Israel and NATO as a means of easing Israel’s insecurity. “Military action is not our preference. It remains, as it always must, a last option,” McCain said. But he added, “There is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that is a nuclear armed Iran.”
Edwards, the only Democratic presidential candidate to address the conference, similarly called for tougher sanctions on Iran and held out the threat of military force, but he broke with the others by suggesting that Washington open a dialogue with Iran. He added that stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons “is the greatest challenge of our generation.”
RAFSANJANI: IRAN SHOULD GIVE UP ITS NUCLEAR PROGRAM
Former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani said in an interview with the British newspaper, The Guardian, last Friday that his country should give up its nuclear program in order to avoid the risk of a confrontation with the United States or Israel and the collapse of the Islamic regime.
He said he was trying to persuade the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in state matters, that further negotiations are essential to avoid a potentially disastrous conflict with the U.S. or Israel.
ISRAEL “DRAFTING A STRATEGY TO JOIN NATO”
In an effort to establish more effective deterrence in the face of Iran’s race to obtain nuclear weapons, Israeli government ministries are, for the first time, working on drafting a position paper that will include a strategy for turning Israel into a full-fledged member of NATO.
The paper is being drafted by an interministerial committee made up of representatives from the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry and headed by the National Security Council. It plans to complete its paper by the end of February and present it to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for approval.
At the Herzliya conference last week, former Spanish prime minister Jose Aznar said that “Israel, Australia and Japan should be asked to join NATO as soon as possible.” Aznar said that NATO needed to change its focus to counter the growing threat of global terrorism.
He added that Israel joining NATO would help deter Iran. (For more on this, see this article, in which I am quoted on this matter: www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3355577,00.html)
But the editor and publisher of German weekly paper Die Zeit, Josef Joffe, (who is also a subscriber to this email list) said he believed joining NATO would restrict Israel militarily. He said that NATO would likely make such restrictions a requirement for membership. “With that in mind, why would Israel want to join NATO?” he asked.
“From a technical perspective, Israel would make a wonderful partner for NATO. It would beat anything the Europeans could field. But from a rational perspective, would NATO leaders want to fight Israel’s wars? What NATO country wants to put its soldiers in Israel?”
HIZBULLAH OFFICIALLY OPENS AN IRAQI WING
The following two items were translated from Arabic especially for this email list:
The Saudi daily al-Watan reported that Hizbullah has strengthened its official presence in Iraq, by opening three offices in the center and north of the country under the name “The Iraqi Hizbullah”. According to the newspaper, Iraqi political sources say that the offices were opened in the al-Nassiriyah, Diyala and al-Najaf provinces. The newspaper says there is a wide basis of support and popularity in Iraq for the Lebanese Hizbullah following their “victory” over Israel, and their having previously trained Iraqi militias (as detailed in the past on this email list/website).
The Iraqi Hizbullah, ends the report, is led by Hassan al-Sari, the Iraqi Minister of State, and is one of the strongest groups that make up the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, headed by Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim. It centers its activity in the northern provinces of the country.
[1] Source: www.al-Watan.com.sa/daily/2007-01-18/first_page/first_page03.htm
[2] For a map of the global reach of Hizbullah (now a bit out of date, but still worth looking at), please visit – www.intelligence.org.il/sp/hizbullah/hizbu_ag.doc
[3] Al-Watan is a leading reformist newspaper in Saudi Arabia. It received some notoriety when its editor, Jamal Kashoggi, was fired for speaking out against the country’s hardline Islamist clerics because they refused to denounce the May 2003 Riyadh compound bombings.
[4] Hizbullah in Iraq’s website, which has been located by this email list/website, and appears to still be under construction as not all the parts work yet, is: www.algalibon.com. According to the site, Hizbullah now has offices in all six provinces of Iraq.
DIPLOMATIC SOURCES: IRANIAN SPIES KILLED FORMER EGYPTIAN AMBASSADOR IN IRAQ
Yesterday’s edition (Sunday, 28 January 2007) of al-Watan, reported the following:
“Diplomatic sources from the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram have revealed that Iranian intelligence was behind the killing of Ihab al-Sherif, Egypt’s former ambassador to Iraq. Sharif had been appointed ambassador to Iraq, and arrived on June 1, 2005. He was kidnapped five weeks later on July 3. His abductors killed him four days after he was seized.
“In light of this, the diplomatic sources said, the Egyptian, Jordanian and Gulf States would be even more supportive of the new American plan to send more troops to Iraq, which they said was justified. They pointed out that the Egyptian support of the plan did not arise out of a vacuum. It would help rescue Muslims, who are our brothers, and victims of ethnic cleansing, particularly in Baghdad, at the hands of armed militias.”
IDF DESTROYS TWO HIZBULLAH BUNKERS WITHIN ISRAELI TERRITORY
The Israel Defense Forces destroyed two Hizbullah bunkers on Friday. The bunkers had been located within internationally-recognized Israeli territory. One of the bunkers was discovered during the war with Hizbullah terrorists last summer in southern Lebanon, according to Ha’aretz. The other was discovered last Wednesday while soldiers were searching the Katamon Valley close to the border with Lebanon.
The two connected bunkers had been used by Hizbullah as a forward base for its attacks. Inside the bunkers Israel found food, shovels and other equipment. The bunkers were detonated in a controlled environment by IDF engineering forces. The goal of the search operation, said the IDF, was to prevent Hizbullah terrorists from returning to posts they manned before the recent war.
LEBANESE ARMY HESITATES AGAINST HIZBULLAH
Lebanese security forces have acknowledged that they have been slow in confronting Hizbullah’s efforts to paralyze the country. Officials acknowledged that Lebanese Army troops and security forces responded inadequately to Hizbullah’s latest anti-government campaign. They said Lebanese troops, many of them Shi’ites, ignored orders to prevent Hizbullah from blocking roads and services.
“There was either collusion [between Hizbullah and the security forces], dawdling or unclear decisions,” Lebanese Tourism Minister Joe Sarkis said.
The assessment came amid rising violence between anti- and pro-government factions in Lebanon. On Wednesday, dozens of people were injured in gun battles in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city. On Thursday, riots between Sunni and Shi’ites in south Beirut left four dead and 152 injured, and prompted the Lebanese army to impose an overnight curfew for the first time in a decade. The Iranian-backed Hizbullah is seeking to bring down the pro-Western government.
Hizbullah supporters held up images of their leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and burned those of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, whose assassination in 2005 triggered Lebanon’s latest political turmoil.
IDF: OLMERT GOVT. WON’T LET US STOP HIZBULLAH FROM REARMING
Israel’s political echelon has “tied the IDF’s hands” and is preventing military operations that could stop Hizbullah from rearming and gaining strength ahead of a possible new round of violence this summer, a high-ranking IDF officer told The Jerusalem Post on condition of anonymity.
According to the officer, the IDF is not responsible for the lack of action against Hizbullah – which Israeli intelligence says is receiving almost daily arms shipments from Syria – and the Israeli cabinet has decided the military should refrain from initiating operations to thwart the smuggling. The IDF believes that Hizbullah has restored its strength to the level it was at before last summer’s war.
Separately, Director of IDF Strategic Planning Brig.-Gen. Udi Dekel has said that Hizbullah was busy rearming, receiving “nonstop” weapons shipments from Syria. This was the first time a high-ranking IDF officer has publicly confirmed that Damascus is shipping weapons to Hizbullah. The weapons originated in Iran, he said.
MASSIVE INTERNATIONAL AID FOR LEBANON
At last Thursday’s international donors conference in Paris, billions of dollars in cash and loans were pledged to Lebanon. The United States has promised to triple its aid to some $770 million, France will give $650m, and the European Union itself will give $520m. Some 35 nations made pledges totaling $7.6 billion.
Saudi Arabia headed the list of donors with a promise of $1.1 billion. Of the American pledge of $770 million, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said $250 million will be “liquid cash assistance” and the rest will fund “projects.”
The UAE promised $300 million and the Arab Investment Bank $250 million. The Islamic Development Bank offered $250 million. Most European countries pledged to make generous individual contributions in addition to their EU donations.
The families of kidnapped Israel Defense Forces soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev asked French President Jacques Chirac to work with the donor countries to ensure that UN Security Council Resolution 1701 is implemented in full, and not just the clauses regarding rebuilding Lebanon. In a letter timed to coincide with the Paris opening of the conference, the families wrote: “We support the transfer of financial aid to rebuild Lebanon as agreed under 1701, but the same resolution also requires the immediate unconditional release of our sons... Our sons have been held in inhuman conditions by Hizbullah in overt violation of international law and the Geneva Convention for more than six months. We call on the donor nations: Don’t forget the part that calls for Udi and Eldad’s release.”
U.S. TROOPS AUTHORIZED TO KILL IRANIAN OPERATIVES IN IRAQ
The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Teheran’s influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, counterterrorism officials have told the Washington Post.
For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The “catch and release” policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran while intimidating its emissaries.
Now senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran’s regional influence grows and U.S. efforts to isolate Teheran appear to be failing. Iranian intelligence officers, plus members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Command, are believed to be active inside Iraq.
NETANYAHU ASKS U.S. PENSION FUNDS TO QUIT IRAN
Israel’s Likud opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu has asked one of the biggest U.S. pension funds to pull money out of companies doing business with Iran because of fears over Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
“This allows you to use economic pressure that might obviate the need to use different measures,” former prime minister Netanyahu told reporters. Massachusetts Treasurer Tim Cahill and Michael Travaglini, executive director of the state’s $46 billion pension fund, said they would consider the request. Representatives of Rhode Island and New Hampshire, which have smaller pension funds, also attended the meeting.
Netanyahu was also due to meet with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose state’s Public Employees’ Retirement System, Calpers, manages the world’s biggest pension fund with $225 billion.
In the past, Massachusetts divested from South Africa and Northern Ireland over social and political issues.
***
I attach six news reports about Iran below.
-- Tom Gross
RUSSIA COMMITTED TO IRAN NUCLEAR PLANT LAUNCH
Russia committed to Iran nuclear plant launch: Ivanov
Agence France-Presse (AFP)
January 28, 2007
Visiting Russian security chief Igor Ivanov said that Moscow is committed to launching Iran’s first nuclear power plant on schedule in September, the official IRNA news agency reported.
“Russia is determined and serious in fulfilling its obligation to finish Bushehr plant on the scheduled date,” Ivanov was quoted as saying today (January 28) after meeting Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.
In September 2006, Russia and Iran signed an agreement setting September this year as the deadline for the launch of the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power station which lies on the Gulf coast in southwestern Iran.
The plant will actually produce electricity from November 2007, and the nuclear fuel for the plant is to be delivered no later than March.
Ivanov, the Russian Security Council secretary, is also due to meet Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and national security chief and top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani. He is expected to hold a press conference with his Iranian counterpart later.
Russia supports Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology but voted for a UN Security Council resolution in December that imposes sanctions on Tehran over its repeated refusal to freeze uranium enrichment.
RUSSIA’S THIRD LARGEST CITY MAY BE SOURCE FOR URANIUM
Russian city may be source for uranium
By Jim Heintz
The Associated Press
January 27, 2007
Novosibirsk is located in the depths of Siberia, but despite the remoteness it’s one of Russia’s main areas for nuclear activity and a cause of concern for those worried about nuclear materials falling into terrorists’ hands.
The concerns about Russia’s third-largest city rose to the forefront this week after officials in the former Soviet republic of Georgia announced the arrest of a Russian man for allegedly trying to sell weapons-grade uranium to an undercover agent.
The man, who was arrested last year, initially told his interrogators the uranium came from Novosibirsk, 1,600 miles east of Moscow, Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili told The Associated Press on Saturday. He later recanted his statement, but Georgian authorities sent a letter to Russia’s Federal Security Service inquiring about the possible link to Novosibirsk, Utiashvili said. The agency declined to comment Saturday.
A top Russian science official has said the sample of the alleged contraband uranium provided by Georgia was too small for analysis that could determine its origin.
The episode appeared to cast doubt on Russia’s ability to halt the black-market trade in nuclear materials and renewed concern about security at Russia’s array of nuclear facilities.
The Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant is one of Russia’s main facilities for producing enriched uranium both for use in nuclear reactors and in the higher concentration that could be used to make an atomic bomb.
In addition, highly enriched uranium has been shipped into Novosibirsk in recent years from former Soviet bloc countries, including Poland and Romania. Under a program backed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the uranium is to be blended down into lower concentrations.
The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration funded a program to improve security at the Novosibirsk plant as part of a wider initiative to boost security at facilities throughout Russia. The NNSA says the Novosibirsk plant completed its upgrade in late 2004.
However, security apparently was lax in Novosibirsk for years before that. In 2002, the head of the agency that was then responsible for security at nuclear facilities admitted that weapons-grade nuclear material had disappeared from Russian facilities.
“Most often, these instances are connected with factories preparing fuel” including Novosibirsk’s, the official, Yuri Vishnyevsky, said at the time.
Novosibirsk was also the site of the 1997 arrest of two men who officials said intended to smuggle some 11 pounds of enriched uranium to Pakistan or China. That uranium reportedly was stolen from a plant in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.
Security at Russia’s nuclear facilities was seen as deteriorating rapidly in the early years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when economic hardships made black-market activities increasingly widespread and as political chaos left official lines of command and supervision shaky.
The U.S.-based organization Nuclear Threat Initiative said in a report last year that Russia remains the prime country of concern for contraband nuclear material.
“Russia has the world’s largest stockpiles of both nuclear weapons and the materials to make them, scattered among hundreds of buildings and bunkers at scores of sites. Over the past 15 years security for those stockpiles has improved from poor to moderate, but there remain immense threats those security systems must confront,” the NTI said.
RUSSIA COMPLETES DELIVERY OF MISSILES TO IRAN
Russia completes delivery of missiles to Iran
Deutsche Welle German radio
January 23, 2007
The head of Russia’s state arms exporter has said that the country has fulfilled a contract to deliver anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. The official Itar-Tass news agency quoted Sergei Chemezov, head of Rosoboronexport, as saying that they completed delivery of the TOR-M1 missiles at the end of December last year.
The United States and Israel say Iran could use the missile systems to attack its neighbours and undermine security in the Middle East. Russia says the missiles only operate over a short-range and are a purely defensive weapon.
The United Nations has banned sensitive nuclear trade with Iran but there are no sanctions on conventional weapons like the TOR-M1 systems.
TOR-M1 ANTI-AIRCRAFT MIDDILE DELIVERY TO IRAN COMPLETED
Tor-M1 anti-aircraft missile delivery to Iran completed – Exporter
RIA Novosti
January 23, 2007
Russian arms export monopoly Rosoboronexport confirmed Tuesday it has completed delivery of Tor-M1 anti-aircraft missile systems to Iran under a contract.
“The [Tor-M1] systems were delivered in late December of last year,” Rosoboronexport Director General Sergei Chemezov said.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov first announced the completion of the delivery last week.
Russia undertook to supply 29 Tor-M1 missile systems to Iran under a $700 million contract signed at the end of 2005. The United States protested the deal, which it feared could bolster the military capabilities of the Islamic Republic, classified by Washington as a “rogue state” and part of “the axis of evil.”
Russia has insisted that the contract for the delivery of the Tor-M1 missiles to Iran was concluded in line with international law, and that the system is intended for defense purposes only.
Last December, the UN Security Council adopted a revised version of a resolution to punish Tehran for its refusal to its halt uranium enrichment, but Russia managed to uphold its economic interests and ensured the implementation of its earlier signed contracts with Iran, including on the construction of a light-water reactor in Bushehr and the delivery of the Tor-M1 and S-300 air defense systems.
The Tor-M1, developed by the Russian company Almaz-Antei, is a high-precision missile system designed to destroy aircraft, manned or unmanned, and cruise missiles flying at an altitude of up to 10 kilometers (6 miles). It was introduced at the Russian aerospace show MAKS in 2005. Each system is equipped with 8 short-range missiles, associating radars, fire control systems and a battery command post.
N. KOREA IS HELPING IRAN PREPARE AN UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR TEST
N Korea helping Iran with nuclear testing
By Con Coughlin
The Daily Telegraph (London)
January 24, 2007
North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year.
Under the terms of a new understanding between the two countries, the North Koreans have agreed to share all the data and information they received from their successful test last October with Teheran’s nuclear scientists.
North Korea provoked an international outcry when it successfully fired a bomb at a secret underground location and Western intelligence officials are convinced that Iran is working on its own weapons programme.
A senior European defence official told The Daily Telegraph that North Korea had invited a team of Iranian nuclear scientists to study the results of last October’s underground test to assist Teheran’s preparations to conduct its own – possibly by the end of this year.
There were unconfirmed reports at the time of the Korean firing that an Iranian team was present. Iranian military advisers regularly visit North Korea to participate in missile tests.
Now the long-standing military co-operation between the countries has been extended to nuclear issues.
As a result, senior western military officials are deeply concerned that the North Koreans’ technical superiority will allow the Iranians to accelerate development of their own nuclear weapon.
“The Iranians are working closely with the North Koreans to study the results of last year’s North Korean nuclear bomb test,” said the European defence official.
“We have identified increased activity at all of Iran’s nuclear facilities since the turn of the year,” he said.
“All the indications are that the Iranians are working hard to prepare for their own underground nuclear test.”
The disclosure of the nuclear co-operation between North Korea and Iran comes as Teheran seems set on a collision course with the West over its nuclear programme, although it insists it is entirely peaceful.
Both countries were named in President George W Bush’s famous “axis of evil” State of the Union speech in 2002.
The United Nations Security Council has unanimously authorised the imposition of “smart” sanctions against Iran.
This is because of its refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment programme, which most Western intelligence agencies believe is part of a clandestine nuclear weapons programme.
France expressed concern yesterday over an Iranian decision to bar 38 UN nuclear inspectors from Iran, claiming that Teheran appeared to be singling out westerners from the inspection team.
Intelligence estimates vary about how long it could take Teheran to produce a nuclear warhead. But defence officials monitoring the growing co-operation between North Korea and Iran believe the Iranians could be in a position to test fire a low-grade device – less than half a kiloton – within 12 months.
The precise location of the Iranian test site is unknown, but is likely to be located in a mountainous region where it is difficult for spy satellites to pick up any unusual activity.
Teheran successfully concealed the existence of several key nuclear sites – including the controversial Natanz uranium enrichment complex – until their locations were disclosed by Iranian dissidents three years ago.
Western intelligence agencies have reported an increase in the number of North Korean and Iranian scientists travelling between the two countries.
The increased co-operation on nuclear issues began last November when a team of Iranian nuclear scientists met their North Korean counterparts to study the technical and political implications of Pyongyang’s nuclear test.
The Iranians are reported to have been encouraged by the fact that no punitive action was taken against North Korea, despite the international outcry that greeted the underground firing.
This has persuaded the Iranian regime to press ahead with its own nuclear programme with the aim of testing a low-grade device, which would be difficult for international inspectors to detect.
IRAN SIGNS DEFENSE COOPERATION AGREEMENT WITH A EUROPEAN COUNTRY
Iran, Belarus sign defense agreement
Agence France-Presse (AFP)
January 23, 2007
www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=2499718&C=mideast
Iran and its top European ally Belarus on Jan. 22 signed an agreement on defense cooperation, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported.
Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar signed the memorandum of understanding with his Belarussian counterpart Leonid Maltsev, who was on a two-day visit to Tehran.
“Exchanging expert delegations, transfer of defense experience and cooperation in technical and educational fields are included in this memorandum of understanding,” the agency said.
Maltsev also met President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the chief of the elite Revolutionary Guards, Yahya Rahim Safavi. Belarus has emerged as a prominent supporter of Iran, openly backing Iran’s contested nuclear program.
Despite fierce Western criticism, Belarus has also sold Russian-made conventional military equipment and spare parts to Iran. The deal was signed as Iran launched a round of war games to test short-range missiles amid the mounting international pressure on Tehran over its failure to suspend nuclear work.
The two countries already signed a raft of deals to massively increase bilateral trade in a November 2006 visit by Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko to Tehran.
Lukashenko’s government has been fiercely criticized by the European Union and the United States, who accuse him of running an authoritarian regime that clamps down on human rights.
* Arab paper: U.S. will strike Iran before April 2007
* And introducing the “Burkini,” the new Islamic swimsuit, complete with head covering
CONTENTS
1. Saudis may ban Letter “X”
2. Welcome to the Burkini, the new Islamic swimsuit
3. 14 Carter Center advisers resign over “apartheid” book
4. Hamas denies recognizing “Israel”
5. Foreign investment in Israel reaches record high in 2006
6. The “Red Crystal” comes into effect
7. Hizb ut-Tahrir seeks to recruit British Muslims
8. British TV documentary exposes extremism in UK mosques
9. Arab paper: U.S. will strike Iran before April 2007
10. “US military strike on Iran seen by April ’07” (Arab Times, Jan. 14, 2007)
11. “Jimmy Carter interceded on behalf of Nazi SS Guard” (INN, Jan. 17, 2007)
This dispatch contains items on a number of different subjects, and includes updates to other recent dispatches.
SAUDIS MAY BAN LETTER “X”
A group of Islamic clergy in Saudi Arabia this week condemned the letter “X” because of its supposed similarity to the banned Christian symbol, the cross.
The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which has the ultimate say in all legal, civil and governance matters in the dictatorial kingdom, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against the “X.”
It came in response to a Saudi Ministry of Trade query about whether a Saudi businessman could be granted trademark protection for a new service of his with the English name “Explorer.”
The request from the businessman, Amru Mohammad Faisal, was turned down.
“Experts who examined the English word ‘explorer’ were struck by how suspicious that ‘X’ appeared,” Youssef Ibrahim reports in the New York Sun.
WELCOME TO THE BURKINI, THE NEW ISLAMIC SWIMSUIT
An Australian designer has created the world’s first two-piece Islamic swimsuit, the burkini. This lightweight, head-to-ankle costume is the first to be streamlined into a two-piece suit which incorporates a head covering.
Aheda Zanetti designed the suit because “A lot of girls were missing out, a lot of women were missing out, on a lot of sporting activities, including swimming.” Australia has a strong beach culture that devout Muslims felt they were unable to participate in.
Zanetti’s company Ahiida, which is based in Sydney, has as its motto: “Modesty is number one.”
Lebanese-born Zanetti, a 39-year-old mother-of-four, says she is something of an accidental designer. Trained as a hairdresser, she has never worn a burqa, the restrictive all-encompassing gown worn by women in more conservative Muslim cultures from which her full-body swimsuits take their name. And she never wore a veil until she began designing sportswear, but does now.
14 CARTER CENTER ADVISERS RESIGN OVER “APARTHEID” BOOK
Fourteen members of an advisory group to the center of former President Jimmy Carter have resigned over concerns that Carter’s book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” does not represent “the Jimmy Carter we came to respect and support.” The fourteen members are not conservatives, but liberal allies of the former Democratic President, who believe his denigration of Israel has gone too far.
The members submitted a joint resignation letter, saying the book confuses opinion with fact. The letter said that the book “portrays the conflict between Israel and her neighbors as a purely one-sided affair with Israel holding all the responsibility for resolving the conflict.”
For more on Carter, please see the dispatch Jimmy Carter called an anti-Semite live on American TV (Dec. 6, 2006).
The final article attached below (which I recommend reading in full) highlights testimony from Neil Sher, a veteran of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigation. In 1987 he received a letter from Carter asking him to show “special consideration” to a man proven to have murdered Jews in the Mauthausen death camp in Austria.
Sher decided to go public now about Carter’s intervention because it “always bothered him… here was Jimmy Carter jumping in on behalf of someone who did not deserve in any way, shape or form special consideration. And the things he has now said about the Jewish lobby really exposes where his heart really lies.”
Daniel Freedman has obtained from sources at the U.S. Justice Department the original copy of Carter’s handwritten note interceding on behalf of the Nazi SS Guard, scanned it, and placed it on his blog at: www.itshinesforall.com/2007/01/exclusive_note.html.
Freedman, who is a subscriber to this list, tells me he has personally seen the note and handwriting experts have verified on behalf of the New York Sun that it is indeed Carter’s handwriting.
HAMAS DENIES RECOGNIZING “ISRAEL”
The following is an official statement released by Hamas in response to widespread media reports last week, following an interview Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal gave to the ever-unreliable Reuters news agency, that Hamas may recognize Israel.
***
Hamas denies statements attributed to Hamas on the recognition of “Israel”
Translated from Arabic
January 14, 2007
An official source in the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), including the following: The Reuters News agency televised an interview with Brother Mujahid Khaled Mashaal, the leader of the political bureau of Hamas movement, on Wednesday, January 10, 2007, but the quoted statements were inaccurate and distorted on the subject of recognition of “Israel.”
And despite the fact that some satellite channels broadcast some excerpts from the statements that showed brother Mashaal, the mass media again insisted on broadcasting and publishing distorted statements. We wish to clarify that what Khalid Mashal said during the interview is that there is an entity called “Israel” that is on Palestinian territories and that it is a reality, but on the other hand, stressed that the Hamas movement’s position in this matter is neither recognition nor acknowledgement.
FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN ISRAEL REACHES RECORD HIGH IN 2006
This is an update to Israel’s economy soars ahead, while Palestinians squander millions (Jan. 12, 2007).
Foreign investment in Israel more than doubled last year, according to a new report by the Bank of Israel. Spurred on by Warren Buffet’s acquisition of Iscar Corporation, foreign investment in 2006 rose to $21.1 billion from its 2005 level of $9.9 billion. (The 2004 level was $7.2 billion.) The bank also reported that Israelis invested five times more overseas in 2006 than they did in 2005, setting a record investment of $21 billion.
THE “RED CRYSTAL” COMES INTO EFFECT
This is an update to the fifth note in the dispatch Donald Trump invests $300 million in Israel (& more Islamic gay-bashing) (July 5, 2006).
The newest symbol of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement – the “red crystal” – came into effect at the beginning of this week. The new emblem, which resembles a cross between a square and a diamond – was created in order to allow Israel to become a member and to permit Israeli relief workers in areas of conflict to operate safely under the protection of a recognized symbol.
Israel’s Red Star of David (Magen David Adom) has for decades struggled to join the International Red Cross. America threatened to leave the Red Cross if the discrimination against Israel continued. Israelis were particularly upset, given the infamous collaboration between some officials of the Red Cross and the Nazis during the Holocaust.
The Palestinian Red Crescent emergency service is already a member of the umbrella relief organization.
HIZB UT-TAHRIR SEEKS TO RECRUIT BRITISH MUSLIMS
This is an update to Islamic militant Hizb ut-Tahrir infiltrates Reuters (& Prince Harry apologizes) (Sept. 15, 2005).
According to the UK newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, Hizb ut-Tahrir is currently attempting to use American air strikes that killed innocent civilians as well as al-Qaeda members in southern Somalia last week, to persuade British Muslims of Somali origin to join their ranks.
The Telegraph said that the Islamic Liberation Party, which is banned by law in Germany, Russia, Pakistan and elsewhere, was distributing leaflets in London accusing the United States of practicing “state terrorism”. The leaflets included graphic images and were written in Somali.
For more, see: www.alwatanvoice.com/arabic/
BRITISH TV DOCUMENTARY EXPOSES EXTREMISM IN UK MOSQUES
Meanwhile, a British TV documentary has secretly filmed imams at a number of British mosques, inciting hatred, bigotry and intolerance. Channel Four television filmed the mosques over a 12-month period. The program “Undercover Mosques” contained sermons showing preachers proclaiming the supremacy of Islam, preaching hatred for Jews, Christians and Gays and for Muslims who do not follow their extreme beliefs.
Imams predicted imminent jihad, and called on British Muslims to “dismantle” British democracy. They must “live like a state within a state until they are strong enough to take over,” said one preacher. The investigation showed the influence in the UK of Wahhabism, an extreme Saudi Arabian interpretation of Islam.
The program also showed how Saudi universities are recruiting young Western Muslims to train in their extreme theology, and are then sent back to Europe to spread the teachings.
The program – which I would strongly recommend watching in full – can be seen in six parts on YouTube. The links are:
Part 1: www.youtube.com/watch?v=peFQWuk4nuo
Part 2: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuCLC8kjWCI
Part 3: www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5t5EqWX92k
Part 4: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMztM0Z7BYE
Part 5: www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4Zv3BUmwqs
Part 6: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvjvNScmTQA
ARAB PAPER: U.S. WILL STRIKE IRAN BEFORE APRIL 2007
The first article below is a report from the Arab Times by Ahmed Al-Jarallah, its Editor-in-Chief, who claims that “Washington will launch a military strike on Iran before April 2007… The attack will be launched from the sea and Patriot missiles will guard all oil-producing countries in the region.”
According to a “reliable source” “they have chosen April as British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said it will be the last month in office for him. The United States has to take action against Iran and Syria before April 2007.”
The source added that “the US and its allies will target the oil installations and nuclear facilities of Iran ensuring there is no environmental catastrophe or after effects.”
-- Tom Gross
KUWAITI PAPER: US MILITARY TO STRIKE IRAN IN APRIL
US military strike on Iran seen by April ’07; Sea-launched attack to hit oil, N-sites
By Ahmed Al-Jarallah
The Arab Times
January 14, 2007
www.arabtimesonline.com/arabtimes/kuwait/Viewdet.asp?ID=9548&cat=a
Washington will launch a military strike on Iran before April 2007, say sources. The attack will be launched from the sea and Patriot missiles will guard all oil-producing countries in the region, the sources add. Recent statements emanating from the United States indicate the Bush administration’s new strategy for Iraq doesn’t include any proposal to make a compromise or negotiate with Syria or Iran. A reliable source said President Bush recently held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice and other assistants in the White House where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail.
According to the source, Vice President Dick Cheney highlighted the threat posed by Iran to not only Saudi Arabia but the whole region. “Tehran is not playing politics. Iranian leaders are using their country’s religious influence to support the aggressive regime’s ambition to expand,” the source quoted Dick Cheney as saying. Indicating participants of the meeting agreed to impose restrictions on the ambitions of Iranian regime before April 2007 without exposing other countries in the region to any danger, the source said “they have chosen April as British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said it will be the last month in office for him. The United States has to take action against Iran and Syria before April 2007.”
Claiming the attack will be launched from the sea and not from any country in the region, he said “the US and its allies will target the oil installations and nuclear facilities of Iran ensuring there is no environmental catastrophe or after effects.” “Already the US has started sending its warships to the Gulf and the build-up will continue until Washington has the required number by the end of this month,” the source said. “US forces in Iraq and other countries in the region will be protected against any Iranian missile attack by an advanced Patriot missile system.”
He went on to say “although US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice suggested postponing the attack, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney insisted on attacking Tehran without any negotiations based on the lesson they learnt in Iraq recently.” The Bush administration believes attacking Iran will create a new power balance in the region, calm down the situation in Iraq and pave the way for their democratic project, which had to be suspended due to the interference of Tehran and Damascus in Iraq, he continued. The attack on Iran will weaken the Syrian regime, which will eventually fade away, the source said.
“JIMMY CARTER INTERCEDED ON BEHALF OF NAZI SS GUARD”
Exclusive: Jimmy Carter interceded on behalf of Nazi SS Guard
By Ezra HaLevi
Israel National News
January 17, 2007
www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=119732
Neil Sher, a veteran of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigation, described a letter he received from Carter in 1987 in an interview with Israel National Radio’s Tovia Singer. The letter, written and signed by Carter, asked that Sher show “special consideration” for a man proven to have murdered Jews in the Mauthausen death camp in Austria.
“In 1987, Carter had been out of office for seven years or so,” Sher recalled. “It was a very active period for my office. We had just barred Kurt Waldheim – he was then president of Austria and former head of the United Nations – from entering the U.S. because of his Nazi past and his involvement in the persecution of civilians during the war. We had just deported an Estonian Nazi Commandant back to the Soviet Union after a bruising battle after which we were attacked by Reagan White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan.
“Also around that time, in the spring of 1987, we deported a series of SS guards from concentration camps, whose names nobody would know. One such character we sent back to Austria was a man named Martin Bartesch.”
Bartesch, who had immigrated to the U.S. and lived in Chicago, admitted to Sher’s office and the court that he had voluntarily joined the Waffen SS and had served in the notorious SS Death’s Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp where, at the hands of Bartesch and his cohorts, many thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. He also confessed to having concealed his service at the infamous camp from U.S. immigration officials.
“We had an extraordinary piece of evidence against him – a book that was kept by the SS and captured by the American armed forces when they liberated Mauthausen,” Sher said. “We called it the death book. It was a roster that the Germans required them to keep that identified SS guards as they extended weapons to murder the inmates and prisoners.”
An entry in the book for October 10, 1943 registered the shooting death of Max Oschorn, a French Jewish prisoner. His murderer was also recorded: SS guard Martin Bartesch. “It was a most chilling document,” Sher recalled.
The same evidence was used by the U.S. military in postwar trials as the basis for execution or long prison sentences for many identified SS guards.
“We kicked him out and he went back to Austria. In the meantime, his family – he had adult kids – went on a campaign, also supported by his church, to try to get special treatment. In so doing they attacked the activities of our office and me personally. They claimed we used phony evidence from the Soviet Union – which was nonsense. They claimed he was a young man of only 17 or 18 when he joined the Nazi forces, asking for some sympathetic treatment and defense from our office, which they claimed was just after vengeance.”
The family approached several members of Congress. “The congressmen would, very understandably, forward their claims over to our office and when they learned the facts they would invariably drop the case,” Sher recalled.
But there was one politician who accepted the claims without asking for any further information.
“One day, in the fall of ’87, my secretary walks in and gives me a letter with a Georgia return address reading ‘Jimmy Carter.’ I assumed it was a prank from some old college buddies, but it wasn’t. It was the original copy of the letter Bartesch’s daughter sent to Carter, after Bartash had already been deported.
“In the letter, she claimed we were un-American, only after vengeance, and persecuting a man for what he did when he was only 17 and 18 years old.
“I couldn’t help thinking of my own father who returned home with shrapnel wounds after he joined the U.S. Army as a teenager to fight the Nazis and hit the beaches at Normandy at that same age on D-day.
“On the upper corner of the letter was a note signed by Jimmy Carter saying that in cases such as this, he wanted ‘special consideration for the family for humanitarian reasons.’
“I didn’t respond to the letter – the case was already over and he was out of the country – but it always stuck in my craw. A former president who didn’t do what I would expect him to do – with a full staff at his disposal – to find out the facts before he took up the side of this person. But I wasn’t going to pick a fight with a former president. We had enough on our plate.”
Now, following Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Sher has decided to go public with the hope that a public made aware of Carter’s support and defense of a Nazi SS man will help illustrate why the arbiter of the Camp David Accords came out with a book defending the Palestinians after the landslide election of the Islamist Hamas terror group.
“It always bothered me, but I didn’t go public with it until recently, when he wrote this book and let it spill out where his sentiments really lie,” Sher said. “Here was Jimmy Carter jumping in on behalf of someone who did not deserve in any way, shape or form special consideration. And the things he has now said about the Jewish lobby really exposes where his heart really lies.”
* Israel “cages” Palestinians into “ghettoes” and “poisons the wells,” says leading UK charity
* Adds patently false claims, such as that Israel’s “Apartheid Wall” annexes 47 percent of the West Bank
CONTENTS
1. The charity that goes to extraordinary lengths to demonize Israel
2. Patently false claims
3. Another brick in the wall
4. Anti-Semitic rhetoric
5. “War on Want Wages War on Israel” (NGO Monitor, Jan. 15, 2007)
[Note by Tom Gross]
Recently I twice drew attention to the particularly harsh anti-Israel campaigns (bordering on anti-Semitism as regards their “IDF checkpoint Christmas cards”) of the well-funded British-registered charity, War on Want.
According to its charter, War on Want is supposed to campaign “against the root causes of global poverty, inequality and injustice,” not use its ample resources to repeatedly demonize the world’s only Jewish state.
Inspired by the atmosphere surrounding War on Want’s campaign, other groups in Britain and elsewhere have got in on the act. For example, in Cambridgeshire, England, the Sacred Heart Church in St. Ives, replaced its annual nativity scene with a 7.2-meter high replica of what it calls “Israel’s Apartheid Wall,” while appealing for donations to groups – which have links to Hamas – in Bethlehem.
For these previous dispatches, see:
* UK paper: Virgin Mary is a “Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem” (Dec. 26, 2006)
* So busy attacking Israel, they forgot about these beheadings (Nov. 21, 2006)
* For the Christmas cards, complete with barbed wire and an Israeli rifle pointing at the church, see: www.waronwant.org/Christmas+Cards+-+Mary+and+Joseph+13386.twl
PATENTLY FALSE CLAIMS
Now the lobby group “NGO Monitor” (whose senior editors subscribe to this list) have followed up this week with a thorough report exposing War on Want’s activities. I attach it below.
According to NGO Monitor, the charity places great emphasis on its “Palestine” campaign, and despite a number of investigations by the UK Charity Commission into its political activities, it continues to misrepresent international law and promote apartheid rhetoric (while ignoring Palestinian terrorism), to justify boycotts, sanctions and divestment campaigns against Israel.
NGO Monitor reports that War on Want’s “campaign” on “Palestine” “is one of only two country-specific campaigns listed on its website.”
War on Want receives funding from a number of sources including the European Union, the UK Department for International Development, and Irish Aid.
ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
The lengths to which this charity goes to demonize Israel are quite extraordinary, says NGO Monitor. War on Want’s website provides a downloadable petition form to send to British Prime Minister Tony Blair calling him “to state his support for sanctions against Israel now.”
They have also pursued “a sophisticated public relations campaign against the ‘apartheid wall,’ involving former Pink Floyd singer, Roger Waters… Its ‘Facts about the Wall’ page misrepresents the July 2004 International Court of Justice advisory opinion as a binding legal ‘ruling’; it describes the ‘surround[ing]’ of Qalqilya without mentioning terrorist attacks that have originated from this town; and asserts the patently false claim that ‘the Wall still annexes some 47 percent of the West Bank.’”
ANTI-SEMITIC RHETORIC
NGO Monitor also points out that “In addition to its rhetoric and political activities designed to demonize Israel, War on Want often incorporates anti-Semitic rhetoric and imagery into its campaigns. Its website frequently abuses Holocaust themes in a highly offensive manner: Israel is accused of ‘caging’ Palestinians into ‘ghettos’; engaging in an ‘expulsion project’; and acting like a ‘heavyweight beating a child.’ War on Want adopts traditional anti-Semitic libels (such as ‘poisoning the wells’) in repeating unsupported allegations that the IDF targets Palestinian water sources as a ‘punitive and discriminatory tool.’”
-- Tom Gross
[To check some of the links in NGO Monitor’s report below, please click on their URL.]
“AN EXTREMELY POLITICIZED NGO”
War on Want Wages War on Israel
NGO Monitor
January 15, 2007
ngo-monitor.org/article/war_on_want_wages_war_on_israel_update_
The UK registered charity, War on Want (WoW) states that it “fights poverty in developing countries in partnership and solidarity with people affected by globalisation.” It says that “poverty is political” and campaigns “against the root causes of global poverty, inequality and injustice.” Despite a number of investigations by the UK Charity Commission for its political campaigns, WoW makes no secret of its politicization and this is evident in its one-sided approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The conflict is a primary issue for War on Want. Its “campaign” on “Palestine” is one of only two country-specific campaigns out of seven projects listed on its website. [1] The prominence and resource allocation for this campaign is likely to grow in 2007.
In a “2006: year of achievement” report, WoW states that “ [m]uch of [our] work has focused on building coalitions in the UK to make a major push for Palestine next year.” The “Palestine campaign” uses sophisticated marketing tactics, including high profile media figures, to promote the Durban Strategy of isolating Israel internationally through its identification with Apartheid South Africa.
The campaign utilizes political rhetoric to portray Israel as aggressor and Palestinians as victims, ignoring the context of terror and misrepresenting Israeli actions in response. WoW publications frequently employ terms such as “war crimes” and “collective punishment,” and consistently condemn Israel’s “campaign of apartheid,” “the apartheid nature of the West Bank,” and the “apartheid wall.”
The Separation Barrier is further described as “part of a wider political game…– annexing the best resources and land for Israel and consigning the Palestinians to… a gigantic prison.” WoW’s distorted portrayal of Israeli self-defensive measures are used to justify its leadership of the boycott and sanctions movement, including campaigns against Caterpillar and extensive lobbying of the Church of England and EU and UK government officials.
FUNDING
War on Want’s finances are not transparent and annual reports or audited accounts are not made available on the NGO’s website. It states that it receives funding from a number of different sources including the European Union (EU), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), Irish Aid (IA) and others. However, no further details are provided on WoW’s website and funding information was also unavailable via the EU and Irish Aid websites. DFID provided War on Want with £265,000 in 2005/06 through its Civil Society Challenge Fund. [2] Based on DFID reports, this money appears to have been directed towards WoW projects in Latin America and Southeast Asia. It is unclear if WoW receives additional monies from DFID to support the “Palestine campaign.”
Howe